All of us are stranded at various international airports. Geoffrey, Michael, Davide and myself are at Rio de Janeiro. Ray is at Santiago. Edson is at Atlanta. Kris has returned home, having been left at Madrid and will present remotely.

If the gods shine on us and Argentina airspace opens, then we will do our best to be there. So I suggest you all pray to your diety of choice, maybe sacrifice something at the alter. I'm off to pray to the god of Cheese :) I think Camembert is a favourite. (Inspired by the book "Small Gods" from that loveable english writer Terry Pratchet).

Btw if you live in Rio and thinking about doing some development of Drools, you are welcome to come and buy us a drink at the poolside and we'll talk you through the Drools codebase :)

What we may have to do is shorten the workshop to a single day, instead of two days - as we have other commitments in Argentina too. I will update the blog the moment I hear more.

If you have to be stranded anywhere Rio de Janeiro isn't too shabby. Michael and myself are at the Sheraton Rio, which has a private beach and beach side pool etched into the side of a mountain. Curtesy of British Airways :)

Drools is great well done Mark but 'else if' condition is missing in your rules code and hence we are not able to proceed further. Could you please add the 'else if' condition so that we can use your drools engine efficiently

The only engine I know that has implemented "else" correctly is OPSJ. Which allows a label on any "eval" or "test" like block, note it doesn't allow it on patterns. JRules allow an "else" condition but only on the last conditional element which must be an "eval" it doesn't allow it anywhere else and definitely not patterns. I find the later unsatisfactory.

We are looking into something similar to what OPSJ does, but we want it to work for patterns too. See "branch":http://community.jboss.org/wiki/DroolsLanguageEnhancements#Branch_Labelled_Else